L I T E R A T U R E

Sati Kumar- The Return of the Native
Dr. Jaspal Singh

Satish Kapil alias Sati Kumar was born in the decrepit Malwa town of Rampura Phul in a Brahmin family of prouhits. His father was a well-known performer of Brahminical rituals and respected for that in the region. Sati went to the village school and for a year to a Gurukul to learn the religious chores so that he could easily step into his father’s shoes and make a living as a priest. But the boy had deviations so he quit the Gurukul and came back to the formal mode of education. After his graduation in Punjab, he went to Delhi University for his post graduation studies where he came in contact with well-known Punjabi writers- Bawa Balwant, Devinder Satiarthi, Harnam, Haribhajan Singh and above all Amrita Pritam. As a result Sati began composing poems, which were radically different from the popular poetic strain of the times.

Sati claimed that he was writing modern poetry in the manner of French poet Rimbeau and the American poet Allan Ginzberg. The mainstream progressive writers disapproved these poems and Sati became a persona non grata in the Punjabi literary world. This precisely was the time when he got a Bulgarian   fellowship to do research at the Sofia University. This was Sati’s first hand brush with the socialist system when it was basking in its imperial glory the world over.

The mighty Soviet Union was launching sputniks and Lunas sending shivers down the spine of many a capitalist countries. Socialism looked invincible. Sati married a Bulgarian girl and in her collaboration translated Ramayana and Mahabharta into Bulgarian that brought him tons of money. After a six year stint at Sofia, Sati migrated to Sweden where he has been living for the last over three decades. From 1964-1979 he published four collections of poems, Pancham, Ghorian di Udeek, Rahao and Tambe da Rukh one after the other. Each of his books created ripples in the tranquil waters of Punjabi literature.

This fecund period of creativity is followed by a long period of sterility. This was the time when Sati was perhaps busy in creating his mean of existence, raising his family and mending his fences. During this time his dear wife Ivanka died of cancer and Sati went into depression that only resorting to create urge of writing could retrieve him. He remained dormant for about three decades, though the writer in him never left him alone. He again rose, looked around in amazement and found that Punjabi literature scene had not changed much ignoring a few exceptions here and there.

He has now staged a come back to the lap of muse and in an interview with Avtar Jandialvi, he has again laid bare his poetic agenda. This book- length interview, Mayajaal spread over 160 pages is interspersed with poems from his earlier collections. The interview here is only an illusory form, since this is a veritable autobiography of Sati Kumar along with a spicy sprinkling of his modernist poems. Modernism as we all know is the product of the twenties of the last century when a host of painters, poets and writers had descended on Paris after having seen the diabolical disaster of the First World War. The sensitive people suddenly found that the youth of that age had undergone a sea change in their behaviour, morals and etiquette. Gertrude Stein, one of the protagonists of the ‘modernists’ dubbed these lumpanised youth as the “lost generation”.

Sati’s Mayajaal- Gallan ate Kavita is very readable autobiography of an emigrant poet of Punjabi. This autobiography is a critique of Punjabi literature and also what has appeared in the last about four decades. Both Avtar Jandialvi and Sati Kumar are to be congratulated for discovering a new genre of literature that has many forms rolled into one. This new experiment also carries the promise that Sati will hence after appear on the literary space more frequently.

BACK